Today we are pleased to release WATIV XX: Twenty Years of Silence, a 20
year retrospective to Baghdad Music Journal. The cassette release
includes both Twenty Years of Silence as well as Baghdad Music Journal
WATIV XX: Twenty Years of Silence is a sonic confrontation with memory
and war, a 20-year audio reflection by William A. Thompson IV, a former
U.S. Army counterintelligence agent deployed to Iraq in 2005.
Side A, composed in 2025, explores how memory lingers not as a narrative
but as signal, texture, and ghost. These new compositions are built from
transcribed speech, including fragments of Southern preacher sermons and
poems by Robert Frost and Walt Whitman that mourn or memorialize fallen
soldiers. These texts are never directly spoken; instead, they are
algorithmically transformed into music using symbolic and spectral
transcription methods, including command-line tools like WAON. The
resulting works are performed on the Infastain Piano, an augmented
acoustic instrument designed by the artist using tactile transducers
mounted to the soundboard.
Side B presents a remastered archival edition of Baghdad Music Journal,
the original wartime album recorded on deployment. Built from field
recordings, captured Iraqi radio, and early speech-to-music experiments,
it was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and profiled in Leonardo
Music Journal. The work has since been cited in Sound Targets by
Jonathan Pieslak (Indiana University Press), a major study of soldiers
and music in the Iraq War.
Together, the two sides form a sonic palimpsest, a magnetic tape
conversation across decades and states of mind, from battlefield
immediacy to long-distance aftermath.
Cassette and digital album are available here:
https://highmayhem.bandcamp.com/album/wativ-xx-twenty-years-of-silence
--
